On Internet Regulation

While in general I wish to keep the government from interfering with private use of the network, I would favor the following.

E-mail

Require senders of commercial advertisements to use a valid return address. Require them to honor requests to no longer send to a particular address. Require them to use the word "advertisement" in the subject field. Advertisements for access to PG, R or X rated materials, or any unsolicited mail containing such materials, shall contain additional appropriate flags (TBR) in the subject field.

Web

There is currently a traditional rating system already made part of the HTML standard. The ratings more or less match the traditional movie G, PG, R and X. So long as web authors make a good faith effort to apply these labels to appropriate pages, the government should in no way limit the free speech of web authors. While the government might specify in clear terms the meaning of each of these four labels at federal or even international levels, it should be left to the local level of government to decide whether a government owned or operated terminal should be restricted from displaying a given rating. Community decency standards should be applied at the local level, not federal. While the government might make tools available to parents to set their own standards of decency within the home, the federal government has no business dictating how these tools are to be used.

Encryption

The government should not invade the privacy of citizens by breaking their encryption schemes, and should not be attempting to weaken the privacy of citizens by limiting size of encryption keys or forcing ineffective key distribution systems designed to make it easy for the federal government to establish a Big Brother style intrusion on its citizens.

There is a need for secure communications on the network. The federal government, in insisting on Big Brother style control over encryption technology, has been the biggest roadblock on the information superhighway. While the FBI and other federal agencies wish to make their jobs easier at the expense of public privacy, all they have achieved has been to make criminal activity easier by blocking implementation of workable encryption technology. Criminals already have available PGP and other encryption technologies. Current federal efforts to establish Big Brother hurt only the honest citizen, who justly does not trust his credit card number to the network.